New Fiction
Dwelling Places by Vinita Hampton Wright.
Mack has lost his farm. After six generations of Iowa farming, the Barnes family has had to call it quits -- just barely saving the family home. Mack and Jodie, along with their two children, Kenzie and Young Taylor, are struggling to gain a foothold in this unfamiliar season of their life together. When Mack returns home after a brief stay in the psychiatric ward, it soon becomes clear that his depression is only the beginning of his troubles. Jodie tries to welcome him back; yet she has coped for so long, she cannot recognize her own desperation -- until she's drawn into the arms of another man.
The House by Danielle Steel.
In a novel of daring and hope, of embracing life and taking chances, Danielle Steel brilliantly captures one woman’s courageous choice to pour herself into a dream–and receive its gifts in return. 
The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez.
The Last of Her Kind introduces two women who meet as freshmen on the Columbia campus in 1968. Georgette George does not know what to make of her brilliant, idealistic roommate, Ann Drayton, and her obsessive disdain for the ruling class into which she was born. She is mortified by Ann's romanticization of the underprivileged class, which Georgette herself is hoping college will enable her to escape. After the violent fight that ends their friendship, Georgette wants only to forget Ann and to turn her attention to the troubled runaway kid sister who has reappeared after years on the road. Then, in 1976, Ann is convicted of murder. At first, Ann's fate appears to be the inevitable outcome of her belief in the moral imperative to "make justice" in a world where "there are no innocent white people." But, searching for answers to the riddle of this friend of her youth, Georgette finds more complicated and mysterious forces at work.
Radical Prunings by Bonnie Thomas Abbott.
A literate, funny, and surprisingly bittersweet debut from a writer with a sharp wit and a green thumb. This rather deceptive work purports to be the collected horticultural columns of one opinionated Mertensia Corydalis, a woman genteel as a rose and just as prickly.